Rituals and Routines

Best Book Writing Software: The 6 Documents You Always Need Open as a Writer - The Write Practice. If you’ve been around The Write Practice long, you’ll have noticed we’ve recently talked a lot about which book writing software you should use.

While I’m a strong believer in “use whatever works for you,” I’m also a strong believer in Scrivener. So today, instead of giving you more reasons why I think you should use Scrivener (because there have already been plenty…) I’m going to tell you which tabs/notes you’ll want to create and have open while you’re writing. Side note, if you don’t use Scrivener, you’ll want to have these as separate documents or pages on Word or Google Docs (or whichever book writing software you use). 6 Essential Documents for Writers Here are the six tabs, documents, or pages you’ll need open all the time if you want to really get your writing done. 1. I LOVE lists. This works incredibly well for my writing as well. For creative writing, I try to stick with time limits instead of word counts since the writing is so unpredictable. 2. A few recent examples for me: 3.
The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine.

The Daily Routines of Famous Writers. In furtherance of another article I wrote on Writing Routines, a friend recently sent me an article with several different author’s writing routines.

It’s always nice to see that everyone has the same struggles and tribulations with writing. A couple of the quotes that really struck me were Ernest Hemmingway and Susan Sontag, which surprises me because I (rather sacreligiously) am not really a fan of Hemmingway.
7 Habits of Serious Writers. Image credit: aless&ro With thanks to Michael Pollock for the article suggestion and title.

I’ve been writing, on and off, since my early teens – but it’s only in the last three years that I’ve really taken my writing seriously. It’s made a dramatic difference. I write far, far more. I write better. In the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside all sorts of great writers, during my MA in Creative Writing, and in my freelancing.

Habit #1: Writing To be a serious writer, you have to write. Yes, that’s obvious.
Write Everyday. The Daily Rituals Of Famous Writers. Mornings: you groggily emerge from your bleary-eyed state, fumbling for the snooze button while steering well clear of that drool patch on the pillow.

Then after downing your first coffee of the day, you proceed to type the final chapter to one of the best-selling novels ever written. Okay, so perhaps you play Angry Birds instead. But whatever your reason for not penning a masterpiece, you can be sure that your own daily habits don't stray too far from those used by famous authors - past and present - to trigger their creative spark. For new book Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, And Get To Work, New York-based author Mason Curry has listed 161 famous names and the 161 very different ways they approached their work. You might even be surprised by a few. So take a look at the 10 literary examples we've exclusively taken from the new book, below, and marvel at how some of your finest books were forged...

Jane Austen Victor Hugo Mark Twain Stephen King Franz Kafka Leo Tolstoy. The Daily Routines of Great Writers. By Maria Popova “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

UPDATE: These daily routines have now been adapted into a labor-of-love visualization of writers’ sleep habits vs. literary productivity. Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of my favorite authors.

Enjoy. Ray Bradbury, a lifelong proponent of working with joy and an avid champion of public libraries, playfully defies the question of routines in this 2010 interview: My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. Joan Didion creates for herself a kind of incubation period for ideas, articulated in this 1968 interview: E.
A Day In The Life Of An Indie Author. Being an indie author, at least when you’re starting out, isn’t always glamorous.

Author H.M. Clarke shares her story and her daily schedule that many of you can probably relate to. Don’t miss the great advice at the end! Do you ever dream your book? I do. When I go to sleep at night, my mind is buzzing with whatever story I was working on and I fall to sleep dreaming of my stories. And occasionally my waking dreams help me work through whatever plotholes had been bugging me the day before.